Jenkins began to hyperventilate.
Tears streamed down his face, dropping onto the steel table.
"Please, I can help you."
"I know people in the department.
I know who is moving drugs in Zone 5. I can give you names. I can give you my captain."
"Oh, we already have your captain," Sam said, standing up and buttoning his suit jacket.
"The DOJ Civil Rights Division just raided your precinct 20 minutes ago."
The FBI is taking over APD Zone 5.
"Your little gang is finished."
Jonathan stood up, looking down at the broken, sobbing man tethered to the table. There was no pity in his eyes, only the cold, satisfying finality of a predator being caught in its own trap.
"Enjoy the penitentiary, Brian," Jonathan said softly.
"I hear former cops are very popular in federal lockup." The three men turned and walked out of the interrogation room. The heavy steel door slammed shut, the heavy deadbolt sliding into place with a definitive clack, leaving Brian Jenkins alone in the dark with nothing but the ghosts of the people he had robbed and the crushing weight of his inescapable karma. While Brian Jenkins sat weeping in a freezing federal interrogation room, a completely different kind of storm was making landfall three miles away at the Atlanta Police Department Zone 5 precinct.
Captain Thomas Harrison sat behind his heavy oak desk, loosening his tie and sipping a lukewarm coffee. It was 4:15 p.m. The shift change was approaching and the precinct was humming with the usual chaotic energy of booking, processing, ringing phones, and loud banter. Harrison was a 30-year veteran who treated his precinct less like a public service building and more like a feudal kingdom.
He knew about the skimming. He knew about the excessive force. He actively covered for officers who handled things in-house. As long as crime statistics looked decent on paper for the mayor's office, Harrison turned a blind eye to the rot spreading through his ranks.
He didn't hear the tactical boots hitting the pavement outside. The heavy glass double doors of the precinct were violently thrown open, shattering the afternoon lull. Fifty heavily armed federal agents wearing dark tactical gear and windbreakers emblazoned with FBI and DOJ civil rights poured into the lobby. They moved with terrifying coordinated precision.
"Federal agents! Secure your weapons. Step away from your desks. Nobody touches a computer."